Life Project

Ethan Hawke traipsed the High Line with his hands in his pockets, his blue-gray eyes wide in the strong morning light. Throngs of tourists turned to watch him pass, marking his trademark bedhead and boyish neck, and, on the back of his green Army jacket, a huge white tiger’s face. He explained that he’d bought the tiger patch out of a dry cleaner’s window “for the thirteen-year-old in me that’s still impressed by the idea of iron-on patches. Everything just seems so uniform, and this isn’t.”

Hawke is forty-two now, and his beard is daubed with gray. Long typecast as the goateed hipster who rages against uniformity in such films as “Reality Bites” and “Before Sunrise,” he grew out of that role by marrying Uma Thurman, having two children, divorcing Uma Thurman, marrying their former nanny, and having two more children. Knifing through a bed of switchgrass, he observed, “The only way for me to have stayed that person was to die, which is the way Kurt Cobain became the ultimate Gen X poster boy. My daughter was just watching ‘The Outsiders,’ and I was thinking about how Matt Dillon captured a certain youthful male energy of that period, and wondering what it was like for him, now that he’s a mature man. Then I realized I was probably thinking about myself.”

The end of the month will bring “Before Midnight,” the third film in the director Richard Linklater’s trilogy about the lovers Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), who spend a night together in Vienna (“Before Sunrise,” 1995), meet again in Paris years later (“Before Sunset,” 2004), and now, as a couple, are on a visit to Greece with their twin girls. The film, much of which was roughed out by Hawke and Delpy from their personal experiences, is appreciably darker than its predecessors. Jesse’s callowness has only grown in middle age, as has Celine’s ability to detect a slight in any compliment. “I’ve had young people see the film who think the couple’s problems are romantic—just the fact of knowing someone else so well that they annoy you so strongly,” Hawke said. He laughed, and went on, “And, from the outsider’s perspective, having kids is romantic.”

It’s now unmistakable that Jesse and Celine’s attraction rests on a fault line of contention. “One of the difficulties of romantic love,” Hawke said, “is that the fantasy of how the other person will complement you and be the balm you always hoped for to heal every wrong your parents did you—that evaporates over time. Everybody’s charm fades.” Acknowledging that even his voice now seems barrel-aged, he added, “I’m slowly turning into Nick Nolte.”

Over lunch at Tenth Avenue Cookshop, he remarked that he has often played a writer onscreen. (At least six times, in fact.) “I did a bunch of movies where I happened to be in the snow, so, when the director of ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ comes along, who does he think of? Ethan Hawke. And then a lot of filmmakers saw ‘Before Sunset,’ so they think of me as a writer.”

In “Before Midnight,” Hawke, who has published two novels, stamps Jesse as a true man of letters by having him yammer on about writing without manifesting any particular desire to put fingers to keyboard. “There couldn’t be anything more boring than watching someone tap on a computer,” he said. “When writers used ink, there was something to do: it was messy, your arm was stained. Even with typewriters, at least it was dramatic to pop those keys”—he air-typed rapidly, pistoning his fingers like a trumpeter. “But the interior life of a writer is very difficult to put onscreen. So Jesse is just how I work out the ideas of the books I’ll never write.”

Will the filmmakers keep updating the Jesse-and-Celine story every nine years? “When I was at the wrap party in Vienna, in 1994, I never thought I’d be saying this, but I could imagine it becoming a life project.” At the same time, he said, there is something bleakly conclusive about the scene in which Celine watches the sun set behind a Greek crag and murmurs, “Still there . . . still there . . . still there”—until, suddenly, it’s not. “The inevitability of decay,” Hawke said. “You can’t keep having first love forever.”

The waiter brought the bill and two peanut-butter cookies. Hawke ate half of one and pronounced it delicious. Then he wrapped the other in a linen napkin, folded the napkin tidily, three times, and slipped it into his pocket for his children. ♦